MY MOTHER.
Gladys Minnie Euinton.

25. October. 1902 - 11. April
2001.

All her long life known as
‘Glad’, my mother was born as Gladys Minnie Westwood, the youngest
daughter of William Charles Westwood and Minnie Sarah Charlotte Westwood.
There were four living members of the family; Doris the eldest, 1898 -
1958, regrettably died of Liver Cancer weeks before her retirement due in
1958, William Charles (junior), the eldest son. Actually there were five
children, that’s why I referred to ‘living’ members earlier, Earnest died
a couple of days after he was born. Then, in sequence is my mother Gladys
and last but by no means least is Bernard who just made his three score
years and ten who died in 1975 at the age of 70.

Mother was 31 when she married my
father, Wilfred Reginald Euinton from Luton, in 1932. I, Barry Euinton,
‘came along’ in 1933 and my younger brother Roger Henry in 1935. Equally
regrettably he died in 2006 of the same ‘problem’ as his aunt Doris -
Liver and in addition in his case, Kidney Cancer.

The Westwood family ran what was
the Red Cow Public House at the top of Wheathampstead Hill. It was able
to support the family because in addition to the Licensed trade there was
also a Grocers shop and a bakery and I well remember my mother helping
Nan, (she was never Grandma), making the Faggots which used to go down
well with the local community and people used to come from far and wide to
sample Nan Westwood’s Faggots. My dear Nan Died in November 1944 shortly
before her 80th birthday and it wasn’t until years later that my mother
told me about the debilitating problem Nan had. It appears that in her
Teens she was seriously ill and had to have a Kidney removed. That wasn’t
the end of the tale though, because the wound never healed for the rest of
her life. This didn’t stop her getting married though and having five
children. However it was my Mother’s responsibility, once she was old
enough to daily re-bandage the wound and she carried the responsibility
for doing this for the remainder of Nan’s life. This was in addition to
looking after my father, brother and myself after she was married.

My Mother and Father saw to it
that my brother and I were well educated and I left St. Albans School at
Easter 1950. My father was able to get me a job with the Eastern
Electricity Board, initially at Hatfield and subsequently at Welwyn Garden
City until the time came in October 1951 when I had to do my National
Service, which I was fortunate to do in the R.A.F. It would take too long
to tell that story now, suffice it to say that I was demobbed in October
1953. I went back to working for the Electricity Board until the beginning
of April 1955 when I left and joined the Weights and Measures Dept. of the
Herts County Council at their Watford Office. I can hear you saying, “ I
thought this was a story about your mother”, it is but the story is very
inter- twined. It was only on the 28th April that year, barely a month
after I started my new job that I came home in the evening and found my
father dead on the floor of our living room. He had taken his own life.
It is fair to say that he had been quite ill as he had had an allergy,
picked up from one of the plants in his greenhouse,(He was a keen
gardener), and it had finally got the better of him. At this time my
Mother had been in Luton visiting some relatives; you can perhaps imagine
the shock she received when I was finally able to tell her what had
happened. However she was a strong lady and she was able to cope well
with this disaster but we had to go through the trauma of a post mortem
and the subsequently delayed funeral.

As always, I suppose, life
settled down and was quite calm until, just before Christmas 1957, my Aunt
Doris became ill and told us that the hospital doctors had pronounced that
she had cancer. My mother immediately made arrangements for her to come
and stay with us here at our home at 31 The Hill, here I must say that my
Aunt had never married and had lived in various places. Once again my
Mother took up the reins and nursed her sister until almost exactly 12
months from the date of diagnosis she succumbed to the dreaded disease.
The doctor’s comment was that apart from the cancer she was an exceedingly
strong woman and would have undoubtedly lived to a great age had fate not
been so unkind.

I thought that this experience
would have knocked my mother sideways. However she proved she was made of
sterner stuff because only about 12 months after Doris had died, William
(always known as Bill) her elder brother who had come to live with us,
fell and broke his ankle as he walked down the hill from the bus stop.
That, reasonably soon mended but the doctor came and saw Mum and told her
that Uncle Bill had leukaemia. So yet again she had to take the
responsibility of looking after a member of her family. I have an input
here. Bill had to go into hospital regularly to have blood transfusions.
On the one he had just before Christmas the hospital was going to keep him
in; however the doctor finally decided that, if on Christmas Eve morning
he was well enough he could come home. We were told, any sign that he was
not feeling well to ring them and they would immediately send an ambulance
to take him back in. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day he was fine. On
Boxing Day morning I took him his morning cup of tea and he said he was
not feeling well. I immediately phoned the doctor at the hospital and an
ambulance was sent to pick him up. When it arrived, the Medic was on his
own and he asked if I could go to the hospital with him to make sure that
nothing happened to him on the way there. So along I went. When the
doctor came out of the ward to appraise me of the situation. He said,
“Look you might as well go home, it’s going to take me two or three hours
to complete my examination, we will call you immediately if anything
happens. The Ambulance man who was still there said, “ I’ve actually got
to go back to Wheathampstead again now and I can give you a lift home but
if you want to take advantage of a lift you must come now. Well what a
quandary, but the thought of having to walk to the bus-stop to go home
from the hospital and the promise of the doctor to call us if anything
went wrong I made the decision to accept the lift. WRONG. I had just got
home when the telephone rang and it was the doctor who said he was very
sorry but Mr. Westwood had just died. It also turned out later that Uncle
Bill was conscious for about the last five minutes of his life and there
was no one there he knew. I have lived with that thought for the rest of
my life.

Though there was my Mother’s
younger brother, Bernard, at that time still with us, he was married.
When he was ill and then died, at least the burden did not fall directly
on my mother’s shoulders though, true to form, she helped as much as she
could.

From about 1975 on, we seemed to
live without anymore of these tragedies and in 1993 I finally retired
having completed twenty years in Weights and Measures then transferring to
Environmental health and completing twenty years with them. I took
voluntary redundancy and with the investment of the larger proportion of
my Redundancy money plus my council pension Mother, who by this time was
nearly 90 years young we managed to live well enough. My Brother who had
a caravan in Somerset let us use it frequently and Mother loved to go down
to St. Audries as often as we could and it enabled her to see her younger
son, her Daughter in Law Jean, the grandchildren and later the great
grandchildren who started to arrive.

I suppose this is the difficult
bit. We stayed with my brother and Sister in law for Christmas and New
Year 2000 and after we came home from Newton Abbot in Devon where they
lived, on the 21st of January 2001 at about 2 o’clock in the morning I
heard what I can only describe as a disturbance in Mum’s bedroom, I went
immediately to see what was wrong. Obviously something was very wrong and
I called for an ambulance and she was taken to Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital
in Welwyn Garden City where she was diagnosed as having a congested heart
condition. Roger, my brother came up to see her and true to form, as
always, she got better with the excellent treatment she got from the
Doctors and Nurses. She did come home. She wasn’t allowed to climb the
stairs so I got a single bed and from then on her bed was in what we call
’the front room’ . For the short time she was there I think she began to
like it. People she knew would tap on the window and wave. But it didn’t
last. All those years that she looked after me, (I never married), and I
couldn’t do the one thing that she said that she always wanted to do and
that was die in her own bed at home, just like her mother. On the 30th
March 2001, she was obviously not well again so I called the doctor.
Unfortunately our doctor was unavailable and a lady locum called. She was
very very good and took the responsibility of telling Mum that she thought
that she had, had a little stroke and that a hospital visit was necessary
to confirm that and give her whatever treatment was necessary. She really
didn’t want to go. But the doctor phoned the hospital and she was on her
way there in minutes. Just as well, she had had a stroke and what is more
she had another whilst we were waiting for her to be examined. That, as
they say, is the end. She was a fortnight in hospital and though at one
stage it looked as if she might make it home again it was not to be and
she died at 9.30 am. on the 11th of April 2001. She never had a really
big stroke such as I’ve seen other people have, she just kept having a lot
of little ones and it ’Did’ for her in the end. As she didn’t die in her
own bed at home, I got the Funeral Cortege to stop outside the house on
the way to the church. We all felt that she would have approved.

She was a good mother to us boys
and my only hope is that she, wherever she is, thinks we repaid her in
some small measure.